Billy Sunday

In Billy Sunday, his second novel published in the United States, Jones turns his ambitious imagination to the American psyche at the end of the frontier period. Three historical figures stand at center stage: Frederick Jackson Turner, author of the famous book of essays The Frontier in American History; Charles Van Schaick, the photographer Michael Lesy made famous in his surreal and haunting book Wisconsin Death Trip; and Billy Sunday himself, an orphan, undertaker's assistant, and onetime professional baseball player who became a charismatic evangelist in the 1890s. Their paths cross during the steamy summer of 1892, when a girl's body is discovered in the woods beside a dreamy lake on the very edge of civilization. This terrible moment becomes the fulcrum for Jones's compelling and tragic meditation on the end of an era, as well as of an ethos, in our history.

Strikingly original, Jones's second novel (after Julia Paradise) works as both a murder mystery and a historical fiction. But the real purpose of the Australian author's elliptical tale is to explore the nature of dreams, destiny and spirituality against the backdrop of the American frontier. Billy Sunday, an orphaned, vagabond, half-breed teenager, wanders into a tiny Wisconsin town in 1892 and secures a job as an assistant to photographer Charles Van Schaick. After learning the trade, Billy is slowly drawn into Schaick's bizarre efforts to photograph spirits in the nearby woods with the help of an erratic, aristocratic medium. When several local women are murdered in the woods under mysterious circumstances, suspicion falls on Billy. The boy narrowly escapes death at the hands of a lynch mob, an experience that propels him to his destiny as an evangelist. The second protagonist is Frederick Jackson Turner, the historian who popularized the notion of the frontier as America's defining metaphor. Turner becomes involved in the affair during his annual summer sojourn in the Wisconsin woods, where he tries to come to grips with the aftermath of a tragic youthful affair with a voluptuous Native American girl whose presence continues to haunt his dreams. Jones's writing is lyrical as he deftly weaves together historical figures, extended dream sequences, meditations on the nature of spiritual forces and the ongoing drama of the murder investigation. A final revelation about the relationship between Turner and Sunday caps a memorable story that is both haunting and disturbing. Rights: ICM.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Australian writer Jones (Julia Paradise, 1987) wades into the murky past, recruits three historical figures as his protagonists, and returns with a mottled, half-throttled view of malaise and mystery in the Great Northern Woods of Wisconsin. In 1892, an odd (and entirely fictional) convergence of forces brings photographer Charles Van Schaick, his half-breed assistant Billy Sunday, and young historian Frederick Jackson Turner, soon- to-be-author of the frontier theory of American history, together in the lakeside village of Balsam Point for the summer. The town, kept alive by summer trade and nearby logging, retains a shadow of its earlier frontier character, with a few diseased Indians still living nearby. But something in the village casts a longer, darker shadow: As Van Schaick pursues his interests in photographing the spirits of the place, Billy has visions of a native woman in the woods and one day comes upon a rotting female corpse. Since teenage girls have been disappearing from town, never to be found, his sighting is believed even when he can't find the body again--and is accused of her murder. Billy escapes by jumping into the lake (where he finds another corpse) and soon after joins the circus. Turner, meanwhile, has been having visions, too, but they are familiar ones and are the primary reason he returns every summer to spend time fishing and daydreaming by the lake. At 16, he had a romance there (his first) with a beautiful Indian girl--an affair abruptly terminated when she became pregnant. He never saw her again but returns annually to the woods where he believes her spirit still lingers. . . . Too many disparate plot threads here to weave together tightly, and the attempt to catch America's identity crisis at the end of the century by focusing on these three men isn't persuasive. Still, the primary setting, an ancient forest in summer where pleasure and horror can almost merge, makes the presence of the past keenly felt. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Presenting his frontier theory at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, historian Frederick Turner said, "In the crucible of the frontier the [European] immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race." In this challenging and ambitious novel, Australian author Jones explores the genesis of this thesis, using the lives of real people--Turner, spirit photographer Charles Van Schaick, and evangelist Billy Sunday, as well as others who are less well known--as springboards for a richly metaphoric north woods allegory. Against a backdrop of murder, madness, and small-town suspicion in Balsam Point, Wisconsin, Billy Sunday is transformed from ragtag orphan to charismatic traveling preacher, a practical mystic embodying a new and uniquely American character. Jones writes with great skill and control, using repetition of images, sentences, and even paragraphs to create a rhythm, like variations on a theme, that holds the narrative together through its daring stylistic shifts. At times, this virtuosity overshadows the story. Even so, Billy Sunday is a thought-provoking work that will inspire readers to learn more about a fascinating period in our nation's history. June Vigor